This Strategic Enterprise Architecture Guide is a practitioner-oriented resource designed to help CIOs, IT leaders, and enterprise architects improve the way architecture contributes to strategic IT investments. It offers clear models and methods for applying architectural insight within planning, governance, and portfolio decision-making.
What distinguishes this guide is its focus on architecture as a decision-enabling discipline. It introduces adaptable roles, practical tools, and frameworks that show how EA can support investment prioritization, foster alignment with business goals, and provide structure to complex choices.
Developed from extensive field research, the guide draws on tested practices from multiple organizations and applies them in real-world decision contexts. It equips leaders with a foundation to integrate architecture into value-driven IT planning and long-term strategic execution.
This Will Help You...
This guide is designed to help CIOs, enterprise architects, and IT governance leaders turn architectural insight into decision-making power. Through models grounded in real-world practice, it enables you to embed EA more effectively into investment planning, portfolio management, and executive dialogue.
- Clarify EA’s Strategic Role:
Use the contextual role framework to determine how architecture can influence different types of IT decisions—helping you allocate the right architectural support at the right stage of planning or funding. - Strengthen Investment Business Cases:
Apply the tested checklist and decision-quality criteria to evaluate and improve investment proposals—helping you challenge weak assumptions and surface overlooked risks or dependencies. - Adapt Architecture to Governance Contexts:
Use the research-based decision typology to tailor architecture engagement to the structure and formality of your organization's investment processes—helping you position EA as a trusted partner in governance forums. - Align Architecture with Financial Planning:
Leverage insights from field studies showing how high-performing organizations connect EA to budget cycles and funding decisions—helping you map architecture work to financial outcomes, not just design intent. - Improve Portfolio-Level Prioritization:
Use the EA maturity and impact model to identify where architecture can add diagnostic value across a portfolio—helping you prioritize change initiatives and investments more effectively.
Whether you're defining architecture’s role in decision-making or guiding major IT investment reviews, this guide supports your efforts to embed enterprise architecture where it matters most: at the point where strategy, resources, and action converge.
